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3 Ways to Prep Your Finances for the Holidays

The holiday season is a time of meaning, gathering, and giving. There are a couple key money moves you can make early on to make sure that’s the focus, instead of financial stress. Let’s talk about a couple different financial situations many of us face at this time of year, and how to navigate them peacefully!

What Do You Love Most About the Holidays?

When getting ready to make any financial decision, it’s important to check in with your values. Setting up your holiday spending plan is no exception. Take a moment and ask yourself these questions:

What do I love most about the holidays?
What are my needs and wants for this holiday season?
What do I want to make sure I do to enjoy this time of year?

These questions will help you get clear on your financial priorities for holiday spending. Pick a few special things, like donating to a cause you care about, taking your family for a sleigh ride, or getting a perfect gift for someone you love.

Then orient your spending plan so that those things happen, and don’t worry about missing out on the rest. As long as you get to do what’s meaningful to you, you’ve spent your money wisely, right? Going through this process will lead to more life satisfaction and less financial stress when you find it easy to pay your credit card bill come January.

Intentional Giving

Speaking of donating, at this time of year all of us are getting requests to donate to various causes. Keep in mind that you get to be intentional about how you donate. You don’t have to respond to every single request.

Again, this is a great moment to check in with your values and ask, what causes matter most to me? Where would I like to focus my donations to make an impact?

Then, identify how much money you have available to donate, and divvy it up according to your priorities. You might choose to make one large gift to a single organization, or spread your money around between several.

Use Money Tools

Both of the processes I have outlined above can be streamlined by using money tools and systems. If you haven’t yet, I highly recommend going through a process of figuring out what you value most in life and discerning your needs from your wants. I also recommend checking out my series on creating a spending plan and my article, “How to Make Donating Money Way Easier On Your Finances.”All of these money tools can be a huge help to navigate any financial situation, any time of the year!

If you enjoyed this article and want to go through this process with a guide, I offer personal financial coaching sessions for just this purpose. Click here or below to book a free 15-minute Financial Self Care Consultation to see if we can work together to address your needs.

3 Tips to Financially Prepare Your Small Business for the Holidays

It’s important to be proactive when it comes to the holidays. They bring a host of financial challenges and opportunities for small businesses. Let’s talk about three ways you can prep your business for the holidays, so that you’re able to have a profitable and satisfying holiday season, without stressing out.

Reflect on This Time In Past Years

Look back to your records to see what happened in your business in past holiday seasons. Which events, specials or sales, and products were the most profitable? If something didn’t go the way you planned, how can you improve on what you did the last few years? This will give you good data to help you focus your offerings this season.

If your business is relatively new, you can simply reflect on the past year and what’s been most profitable for you. Chances are you know what your best-selling products or services are. How can you make sure you have the resources to sell a lot of them? What strategies do you want to use to promote that offering during the holiday season?

Having access to clear financial records is extremely helpful when you’re doing business planning like this.

Plan Sales and Specials

Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday are coming up soon, as well as a host of other times when businesses typically offer sales or specials with their products. Consider whether you’d like to participate in these dates, and how your business is best suited to do that. Perhaps you can focus on promoting packages to up the dollar amount spent by each customer, or offer a deal on your bestselling offering.

Alternatively, you may decide not to participate in these dates, or to do so in a different way. Some small business owners choose not to take part in these events, because it doesn’t feel right to them, or because they choose to celebrate Buy Nothing Day. Even some larger businesses opt out, or take a different path. Deciem, a large skincare brand, holds an annual sale for the entire month of November, to discourage “hyper-consumerism.”

The choice is ultimately yours. Whatever sales schedule you decide to follow, you will also want to take into account your production timeline. Right about now is when many product-based businesses start beefing up their inventories. Here’s an article I wrote for product-based businesses on how to financially survive this process.

If you’re a service-based business or selling digital products, there may still be some considerations for you around your schedule during the holidays. If you’re providing 1-to-1 services, for example, how will your availability change during the holiday season? How can you allocate your resources to ensure you’re able to deliver and make a profit?

Prep for Events

You’ve likely signed up for whatever craft shows, expos, or web events you’ll be participating in during the holidays (or maybe you haven’t yet and now is a good time to think about that!). Now is the time to think strategically about what you can do to get the most out of these events. I wrote an article on upping your profit during holiday events which you can read here.

If this post was helpful for you, you might like checking out my free eBook, The Cash Flow Reboot Guide. This 9-page resource can help you brainstorm to get prepped for a profitable holiday season. Download it for free here.

Angela

Photo by Kira auf der Heide